Shelly's fabulous lion craft provides an opportunity for younger children to practise their cutting skills!
When my kids were younger one of the big activities that I was always trying to sneak in, in a fun way, was cutting skills: using their scissors carefully and being able to cut out shapes with confidence. I found that my son was not keen on a cutting worksheet, but preferred the cutting to be part of an activity - something he did while he was creating. And one of the activities I remember doing with him was this paper craft lion, where he had to cut out strips for the lion’s mane. I remember him getting frustrated because his drawing of a lion’s face was never accurate, so when I recently spotted this lion tracing page I immediately thought of using it. We could just cut out that lion’s face. Voila! There is no issue with having to draw the face. So I decided to do two examples to show you.
Start by printing out the lion tracing page and cutting out his face.
Lion paper craft - start with the tracing page
Now the idea is the kids will cut strips of coloured paper. For more confident kids you can ask them to try and make the strips a consistent width. For younger kids just get them to cut any strips at all! You then stick the strips behind the lions face like so:
Beginning to create the lion's mane
As you can imagine it is not easy to slot pieces of paper in behind the face. We recommend you lightly draw around the lion’s face, and then the kids will know where they need to stick the pieces of paper.
Tracing the shape of the lion's face in position
When they are sticking their strips of paper down they can add as many or as few as they like, they can overlap some, and add strips of different lengths. It all adds to the effect and the individuality of the lion.
Sticking down strips for the mane
We liked the idea of lots of strips all overlapping so you get the idea of a big fluffy mane. Once they are happy with the mane, glue the face on top.
A fluffy mane on this lion!
In the first example we stuck to mainly realistic colours, using different shades of yellow and orange paper and some pale yellow card.
It is also fun to go a bit wild and use all kinds of bright coloured paper – who says you cannot have an abstract lion?
Our colourful lion!
I must confess I really like the end results and I love the way the lions face looked with his mane of paper.
Our completed paper craft lions, side by side.
This lovely butterfly painting comes from Shelly, a home educating parent of two children aged 10 and 12. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on the different learning activities that they do including lots of hand-on maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
